In the field of industrial automation, and particularly within the subfield concerning machine tools and their use, vendors specializing in control technology and software have provided software to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which manufacture and market automated machine tools. The OEMs, in turn, supply automation equipment incorporating this technology and software to end-customers that are typically manufacturers of equipment that own, manage and operate the equipment they purchase from the OEMs. Over the years, OEMs have developed strong relationships with such end-customers.
The OEMs typically do not limit their activities to the development and marketing goods like machine tools, but they also provide follow-up services for the equipment they, and perhaps others, sell to end-customers. While OEMs have provided crucial goods and services, they have been constrained by existing limits on their ability to provide services that take full advantage of detailed information regarding the operation of their machine tools. This constraint stems from limits on the ability of existing systems to gain access to data at the heart of the machine tool control process. Machine tool control software is highly specialized for its given task, and has generally not, in the past, been directed toward the capture or subsequent processing of data for reasons beyond the immediate control of the machine.
For similar reasons, vendors of control systems and software for equipment, such as machine tools, have generally not been in a position to deliver knowledge-based performance improvements in their technology either directly, or in concert with OEMs, to end-customers.
Access to data that is available to the control system of a machine tool, if obtainable and properly managed, could be mined or otherwise taken advantage of to provide end-customers with a variety of efficiencies and other benefits, including improvements in machine availability and lifetime, increases in productivity on the part of end-customer manufacturers using the machines, and other benefits that are described in greater detail below.
An ability to gather live data from industrial controllers, let alone to transmit it over a network to a service provider capable of analyzing, aggregating or otherwise managing such data, and generating solutions for the automated machine tools, have been unavailable. Consequently, there has been no basis for developing any value-added services or software (hereinafter, collectively, “content”) as a function of the gathered data, nor to transmit and download content in the form of services or software from a service provider over a network to an end-customer's (client) machine tool control system, for example.
Instead, engineering services associated with automation equipment, such as machine tools, have been provided manually and then primarily only in response to end-customer requests or due to other motivations having nothing to do with the state of actual controller data. This existing manual approach, however, does not make full use of available network and computing technology. It is incapable of delivering real-time or computation-intensive services, or sophisticated machine-related services, such as axis analysis and optimization, machine data checks, wear analysis, machine inspection and acceptance, machine calibration, dynamic machine modeling, workpiece-related services, process analyses, software services, data management services and the like.
The existing approach to providing software and service-related content to users of automation equipment, such as machine tools, is also unable to provide such content with the economies often associated with computer-rendered, as opposed to manual, services. Access to controller software over a network also provides an opportunity for the delivery of free information services to end-customers, such as information regarding software releases, company catalogs, product and service documentation, chat-rooms and user groups, white papers and other information, which may originate with the control software provider, the OEM, or both.
There has also been an unmet need to help customers shorten development times, to establish market presence more quickly and at more favorable costs, and to enable them to do so with products that are superior to those that have previously been available. Addressing this unmet need would entail measures to assure maximum availability of production facilities, reduce the operating costs associated with those facilities, increase their productivity and deliver maximum product quality.